I shop at Amazon a lot. Like, seriously, A LOT, especially as I work weird hours lately and am not awake when most of the stores are. They are not making any money off my Prime subscription, I tell you what.

And, since I’ve been shopping there since 2001, they have a pretty good picture of what I buy and usually give me pretty good recommendations. I’ve frequently used their recommendation engine in conversation as an example of how to do recommendations RIGHT, unlike some other online store that keep recommending me whatever the current best sellers are without regard to what I’ve actually bought in the past.

Well, there was that brief, horrifying period after I bought some opera DVDs as a gift. Suddenly my recommendations page had a whole lotta Kathleen Battle and Placido Domingo on it.

Actually, in retrospect, it may have been their advanced machine AI deciding that I had shown the first signs of appreciating culture and trying desperately to encourage me to be a better person. I should give them some credit there. Sadly, it did not work and I still spend my days playing video games and watching harem anime.

But, back to the point of all this, which is a rather more recent recommendation that took me a little by surprise:

On the one hand, yes, I would love to hear of any updates from Douglas Adams. On the other hand, I would be terrified if he posted any news to his author page.

Yes, this is a tremendously lazy way to get a post up for the day. Some days I just want to pick a random image and make fun of it.

1 Response to On Amazon Recommendations

We don’t need any updates for Douglas Adams, he already told us the meaning of everything!
Amazing recommendations are a bit odd. My wife uses my computer for searching amazon, meaning I get some odd recommendations sent to me from time to time. I really don’t need any dresses.